A community & newsletter
for neurodivergent
women entrepreneurs.
It’s free! Click ‘no pledge’ ♡
A community & newsletter
for neurodivergent
women entrepreneurs.
It’s free! Click ‘no pledge’ ♡
it’s her
audhd
business
Join community waitlist →about karina
late-diagnosed, self-employed, and making it make sense
I’m Karina — an ICF-certified coach and business consultant who was diagnosed with auDHD well into adulthood. For most of my career I worked inside other people’s structures: universities, tech companies, big brands. I was good at it. I was also exhausted in a way I couldn’t quite explain until I finally had words for how my brain works.
After years on both sides of the hiring table — learning experience design, educational content, team-building — I made the leap. Not because I had it all figured out, but because staying stopped making sense.
Now I work with late-diagnosed auDHD women who are building businesses on their own terms. We figure out the work that actually fits, find the clients worth keeping, and build income around a life that makes sense — not somebody else’s template for what that should look like.
My version of success has a number and a shape. Yours probably does too — even if you haven’t said it out loud yet.
letters from karina
11 June 2026
All of you. One niche.
Pick a niche. If those words make something in you go quiet — or tense, or just tired — you’re not alone. I’ve heard it from so many women at the start of building something. I’ve felt it myself. The advice isn’t wrong. But it lands wrong. Because to a certain kind of brain — one that was never built for tunnel vision — it sounds like something is about to be amputated. There’s a word for the kind of person who has never been able to answer ‘what do you do?’ in one sentence. Multipotentialite 1 — someone with many genuine interests who moves between them not out of flakiness, but because each one is actually interesting. Not scattered. Reaching. For auDHD brains, this isn’t a personality quirk. It’s how the whole thing works. When something genuinely catches — really catches — the focus can be extraordinary. Hours disappear. A thread gets followed all the way to its end, and you come out the other side knowing things you didn’t know before. Then the thread runs out, and the brain finds another one and goes just as far. Different subject. The same real engagement. The interests cycle. They always have. The career that results makes complete internal sense and looks, from the outside, like a lot of things. This is the octopus. Eight arms, all moving, all reaching somewhere real. Image source And when someone says pick a niche , what the octopus hears is: pick one arm. The rest go. No wonder it lands badly. This isn’t fear of commitment. It’s the completely reasonable response of a creature that knows exactly what it is, being told to amputate seven-eighths of itself to be taken seriously. There’s a real reason people keep giving this advice, and it’s worth sitting with before dismissing it. A niche is what makes you findable. It’s what makes you stick in someone’s memory — and in someone’s head when they’re talking to exactly the person who needs you. A psychotherapist who works with anyone is easy to forget, hard to refer. A psychotherapist who works specifically with late-diagnosed auDHD women entrepreneurs? That catches. That stays. That gets mentioned. A niche is also what makes it possible to work with the people you actually want, doing the specific thing you’re genuinely good at, and to charge what that specific thing is worth. It’s not about shrinking. It’s about pointing. Here’s where the advice goes wrong: it applies the niche to the wrong thing. The niche doesn’t go on you. The octopus extends one arm — deliberately, clearly — and that arm points toward something specific. The rest stay exactly where they are. The creature reaching is still whole. [Illustration: the same octopus, one arm extended forward and pointing — the other seven arms still present, still going their own directions] Here’s what this looks like in practice. Kira Kuzmenko built a recruitment agency, a research centre, a jobs platform, several courses, and a salary analytics product. Different arms, different directions — and one obsession running underneath all of them: hiring, from every possible angle. The agency serves companies looking to hire. The platform serves candidates looking to be hired. The analytics tool speaks to anyone trying to understand what their work is actually worth on the market. The creature behind all of it is enormous, and that’s precisely why the expertise is real. None of those arms is doing the same thing. None of them is wasted. Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a researcher, a founder, a newsletter writer, and a book author. Her newsletter, Ness Labs, is for curious, knowledge-hungry people who want to think and work better. Her book, Tiny Experiments , is for people who want to stop overthinking their lives and start testing them instead. Her postdoctoral research at King’s College London lives in academic neuroscience. Three specific conversations, three specific arms. And none of them is all of her. My own path follows the same logic. University administration, learning experience design, building educational teams for tech companies, creating content for big brands. Both sides of the hiring table, more times than I can count. Freelanced, worked in-house, consulted. The path is not linear. It never was. But for this newsletter — for this particular arm — the pointing is specific. Late-diagnosed auDHD women building businesses. Women who want work that fits, clients they’ve actually chosen, income designed around a life that makes sense to them. The other seven haven’t gone anywhere. None of it’s wasted. It’s just not what this arm is pointing at. The niche is not another mask. It’s just where one arm is pointing. Karina If you’ve read this far, you’re probably my person. Subscribe — I write letters because I believe some things deserve to be sat with. 1 Emily Wapnick coined this term — her TED talk and her book are the place to start if this is the first time you’re hearing it.
read →28 May 2026
I'm not a businesswoman (or so I thought)
There is a post I read a few years ago about a woman who had a line in her internal self-description that went: I don’t run. Not a decision. Just: I am not someone who does that. The identity was fixed, and because it was fixed, it was true — the sentence held the whole story together, and pulling it out would have meant rebuilding more than a fitness habit. Hers was about running. Mine was: I’m not an entrepreneur. There is something particularly sticky about this kind of sentence for an auDHD brain. The autistic part tends to treat categories as fixed and final — you are, or you aren’t, no gradient. The ADHD part keeps pulling toward something new. The result is an identity you’ve quietly outgrown but that holds its shape, anchoring you somewhere you no longer fit. And the thing keeping mine in place was what I’d been shown. The word ‘entrepreneur’ still tends to conjure a specific kind of person — and it is rarely a woman. When a woman does appear, she is very serious. Capable, well-prepared, blazer, voice calibrated to take up exactly the right amount of room. I admire those women. I am not one of them. In tech, it was the founder type: cisgender men animated by growth as an end in itself. The definition of success was to eventually stop — exit the company, take the money, never have to work again. I could not find myself in this picture. Why would I want to stop? I spent most of my career on the side of creating educational content. There was a gap I couldn’t quite see across — between the meaning side and the money side, between making things and building something you could call a business. Not a contradiction. Just a distance I didn’t know how to close. The people on the business side weren’t thinking about what students were actually learning. They were thinking about revenue. Two streams running alongside each other, never quite meeting — and I spent a long time mistaking that distance for a contradiction. It wasn’t one. If you don’t formulate your own version of success, you tend to borrow one — from your parents, from the culture you grew up in, from the people who were loudest in the rooms you passed through. And then you work very hard toward a picture that was never actually yours. My version has a number and a shape. The number is not a billion — it is €10–15k a month, which is specific and enough and mine. The shape involves being able to grow the kind of nails that are technically incompatible with a full day of typing. Gelato on a Tuesday. Buying a ticket to see La Femme in Bologna without the decision being about whether you can afford it. None of this looked like the entrepreneur in my head. For a long time, I organised my sense of what was possible around a quiet hierarchy — and it didn’t require much active maintenance. Employment was real. Freelancing was precarious, but at least familiar. Business — actually owning something, calling it mine — sat so far outside the category of things that applied to me that I didn’t even need to refuse it. It simply wasn’t a question I was asking. As long as ‘entrepreneur’ meant that other person, I was quietly exempt from becoming one. At some point, it started to loosen. Through coaching, through reading, through research and other people’s stories and the slow accumulation of evidence that someone like me could actually do this — the identity became real. Not a revelation. Something that happened in layers, over years. And then, gradually, it became mine. Nails like small paintings, and all. I don’t run was true until the woman who wrote it started running. The identity followed the action. Not the other way round. The entrepreneur you were looking for doesn’t exist yet. She is waiting for you to make her. And she gets to look like you — which is to say, nothing like what you’ve been shown. When she does, someone else will see her and run the calculation differently. Karina If you’ve read this far, you’re probably my person. Subscribe — I write letters because I believe some things deserve to be sat with.
read →14 May 2026
I think you don't exist
A while back, I was being coached. The person coaching me was a woman from Pakistan. At some point in our session, I had this sudden, almost embarrassing realisation: I couldn’t fully believe she was real. Not her specifically — she was very much real, and very much present, asking me sharp questions. But this mental construct I’d been carrying since childhood had just shown up uninvited: the sense that people ‘from abroad’ are somehow not quite there. Not quite solid. Either fictional, or impossibly competent, or both. I grew up in Moscow. At some point in English class, our teacher gave us an assignment: write a letter to a pen pal from England. I wrote the letter — carefully, in my best handwriting, with my most earnest sentences. But even as I wrote it, something felt slightly unreal about the exercise. Were these people actually there? Did they have kitchens and arguments with their parents and favourite songs? Or were they more like a concept — people from England — existing in some abstract elsewhere? I’ve watched the same thing show up with clients. Women who speak fluent English, fluent Italian, who have genuinely brilliant careers — and still say, almost apologetically, ‘I don’t think working internationally is really realistic for me.’ Women who undersell their services to people far less talented, because some part of them still believes the world beyond their immediate context is populated by impossibly qualified people who would never pay for what they offer. Here’s what that session cracked open: there is no singular ‘abroad.’ No monolith of exceptional, unreachable people. Just people, in specific places, with specific contexts — and the gap between you and them is rarely what your brain tells you it is. This newsletter exists partly because of that realisation. My name is Karina — a late-diagnosed auDHD woman, an ICF-certified coach, and a business consultant. The women I work with have already made the leap — they’ve left employment, they have clients, and they’re working toward income that arrives consistently enough to build a life around. They don’t fit neatly into the ‘serious businesswoman in a blazer’ template, and they’re not trying to. Freedom matters to them. Genuinely interesting work matters to them. They’re figuring out how to build something that actually reflects who they are. Most business advice wasn’t built for someone who simultaneously craves a meticulously organised Notion system and wants to launch forty-three projects at once — and who has masked so effectively, for so long, that she’s lost track of what she actually wants underneath all that adaptation. What we’ll talk about here isn’t growth for its own sake. It’s about finding work that fits, clients you actually want, and building income around a life you’re designing — not somebody else’s template for what that should look like. Welcome. You exist. Karina If you’ve read this far, you’re probably my person. Subscribe — I write letters because I believe some things deserve to be sat with.
read →11 June 2026
All of you. One niche.
Pick a niche. If those words make something in you go quiet — or tense, or just tired — you’re not alone. I’ve heard it from so many women at the start of building something. I’ve felt it myself. The advice isn’t wrong. But it lands wrong. Because to a certain kind of brain — one that was never built for tunnel vision — it sounds like something is about to be amputated. There’s a word for the kind of person who has never been able to answer ‘what do you do?’ in one sentence. Multipotentialite 1 — someone with many genuine interests who moves between them not out of flakiness, but because each one is actually interesting. Not scattered. Reaching. For auDHD brains, this isn’t a personality quirk. It’s how the whole thing works. When something genuinely catches — really catches — the focus can be extraordinary. Hours disappear. A thread gets followed all the way to its end, and you come out the other side knowing things you didn’t know before. Then the thread runs out, and the brain finds another one and goes just as far. Different subject. The same real engagement. The interests cycle. They always have. The career that results makes complete internal sense and looks, from the outside, like a lot of things. This is the octopus. Eight arms, all moving, all reaching somewhere real. Image source And when someone says pick a niche , what the octopus hears is: pick one arm. The rest go. No wonder it lands badly. This isn’t fear of commitment. It’s the completely reasonable response of a creature that knows exactly what it is, being told to amputate seven-eighths of itself to be taken seriously. There’s a real reason people keep giving this advice, and it’s worth sitting with before dismissing it. A niche is what makes you findable. It’s what makes you stick in someone’s memory — and in someone’s head when they’re talking to exactly the person who needs you. A psychotherapist who works with anyone is easy to forget, hard to refer. A psychotherapist who works specifically with late-diagnosed auDHD women entrepreneurs? That catches. That stays. That gets mentioned. A niche is also what makes it possible to work with the people you actually want, doing the specific thing you’re genuinely good at, and to charge what that specific thing is worth. It’s not about shrinking. It’s about pointing. Here’s where the advice goes wrong: it applies the niche to the wrong thing. The niche doesn’t go on you. The octopus extends one arm — deliberately, clearly — and that arm points toward something specific. The rest stay exactly where they are. The creature reaching is still whole. [Illustration: the same octopus, one arm extended forward and pointing — the other seven arms still present, still going their own directions] Here’s what this looks like in practice. Kira Kuzmenko built a recruitment agency, a research centre, a jobs platform, several courses, and a salary analytics product. Different arms, different directions — and one obsession running underneath all of them: hiring, from every possible angle. The agency serves companies looking to hire. The platform serves candidates looking to be hired. The analytics tool speaks to anyone trying to understand what their work is actually worth on the market. The creature behind all of it is enormous, and that’s precisely why the expertise is real. None of those arms is doing the same thing. None of them is wasted. Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a researcher, a founder, a newsletter writer, and a book author. Her newsletter, Ness Labs, is for curious, knowledge-hungry people who want to think and work better. Her book, Tiny Experiments , is for people who want to stop overthinking their lives and start testing them instead. Her postdoctoral research at King’s College London lives in academic neuroscience. Three specific conversations, three specific arms. And none of them is all of her. My own path follows the same logic. University administration, learning experience design, building educational teams for tech companies, creating content for big brands. Both sides of the hiring table, more times than I can count. Freelanced, worked in-house, consulted. The path is not linear. It never was. But for this newsletter — for this particular arm — the pointing is specific. Late-diagnosed auDHD women building businesses. Women who want work that fits, clients they’ve actually chosen, income designed around a life that makes sense to them. The other seven haven’t gone anywhere. None of it’s wasted. It’s just not what this arm is pointing at. The niche is not another mask. It’s just where one arm is pointing. Karina If you’ve read this far, you’re probably my person. Subscribe — I write letters because I believe some things deserve to be sat with. 1 Emily Wapnick coined this term — her TED talk and her book are the place to start if this is the first time you’re hearing it.
read →28 May 2026
I'm not a businesswoman (or so I thought)
There is a post I read a few years ago about a woman who had a line in her internal self-description that went: I don’t run. Not a decision. Just: I am not someone who does that. The identity was fixed, and because it was fixed, it was true — the sentence held the whole story together, and pulling it out would have meant rebuilding more than a fitness habit. Hers was about running. Mine was: I’m not an entrepreneur. There is something particularly sticky about this kind of sentence for an auDHD brain. The autistic part tends to treat categories as fixed and final — you are, or you aren’t, no gradient. The ADHD part keeps pulling toward something new. The result is an identity you’ve quietly outgrown but that holds its shape, anchoring you somewhere you no longer fit. And the thing keeping mine in place was what I’d been shown. The word ‘entrepreneur’ still tends to conjure a specific kind of person — and it is rarely a woman. When a woman does appear, she is very serious. Capable, well-prepared, blazer, voice calibrated to take up exactly the right amount of room. I admire those women. I am not one of them. In tech, it was the founder type: cisgender men animated by growth as an end in itself. The definition of success was to eventually stop — exit the company, take the money, never have to work again. I could not find myself in this picture. Why would I want to stop? I spent most of my career on the side of creating educational content. There was a gap I couldn’t quite see across — between the meaning side and the money side, between making things and building something you could call a business. Not a contradiction. Just a distance I didn’t know how to close. The people on the business side weren’t thinking about what students were actually learning. They were thinking about revenue. Two streams running alongside each other, never quite meeting — and I spent a long time mistaking that distance for a contradiction. It wasn’t one. If you don’t formulate your own version of success, you tend to borrow one — from your parents, from the culture you grew up in, from the people who were loudest in the rooms you passed through. And then you work very hard toward a picture that was never actually yours. My version has a number and a shape. The number is not a billion — it is €10–15k a month, which is specific and enough and mine. The shape involves being able to grow the kind of nails that are technically incompatible with a full day of typing. Gelato on a Tuesday. Buying a ticket to see La Femme in Bologna without the decision being about whether you can afford it. None of this looked like the entrepreneur in my head. For a long time, I organised my sense of what was possible around a quiet hierarchy — and it didn’t require much active maintenance. Employment was real. Freelancing was precarious, but at least familiar. Business — actually owning something, calling it mine — sat so far outside the category of things that applied to me that I didn’t even need to refuse it. It simply wasn’t a question I was asking. As long as ‘entrepreneur’ meant that other person, I was quietly exempt from becoming one. At some point, it started to loosen. Through coaching, through reading, through research and other people’s stories and the slow accumulation of evidence that someone like me could actually do this — the identity became real. Not a revelation. Something that happened in layers, over years. And then, gradually, it became mine. Nails like small paintings, and all. I don’t run was true until the woman who wrote it started running. The identity followed the action. Not the other way round. The entrepreneur you were looking for doesn’t exist yet. She is waiting for you to make her. And she gets to look like you — which is to say, nothing like what you’ve been shown. When she does, someone else will see her and run the calculation differently. Karina If you’ve read this far, you’re probably my person. Subscribe — I write letters because I believe some things deserve to be sat with.
read →14 May 2026
I think you don't exist
A while back, I was being coached. The person coaching me was a woman from Pakistan. At some point in our session, I had this sudden, almost embarrassing realisation: I couldn’t fully believe she was real. Not her specifically — she was very much real, and very much present, asking me sharp questions. But this mental construct I’d been carrying since childhood had just shown up uninvited: the sense that people ‘from abroad’ are somehow not quite there. Not quite solid. Either fictional, or impossibly competent, or both. I grew up in Moscow. At some point in English class, our teacher gave us an assignment: write a letter to a pen pal from England. I wrote the letter — carefully, in my best handwriting, with my most earnest sentences. But even as I wrote it, something felt slightly unreal about the exercise. Were these people actually there? Did they have kitchens and arguments with their parents and favourite songs? Or were they more like a concept — people from England — existing in some abstract elsewhere? I’ve watched the same thing show up with clients. Women who speak fluent English, fluent Italian, who have genuinely brilliant careers — and still say, almost apologetically, ‘I don’t think working internationally is really realistic for me.’ Women who undersell their services to people far less talented, because some part of them still believes the world beyond their immediate context is populated by impossibly qualified people who would never pay for what they offer. Here’s what that session cracked open: there is no singular ‘abroad.’ No monolith of exceptional, unreachable people. Just people, in specific places, with specific contexts — and the gap between you and them is rarely what your brain tells you it is. This newsletter exists partly because of that realisation. My name is Karina — a late-diagnosed auDHD woman, an ICF-certified coach, and a business consultant. The women I work with have already made the leap — they’ve left employment, they have clients, and they’re working toward income that arrives consistently enough to build a life around. They don’t fit neatly into the ‘serious businesswoman in a blazer’ template, and they’re not trying to. Freedom matters to them. Genuinely interesting work matters to them. They’re figuring out how to build something that actually reflects who they are. Most business advice wasn’t built for someone who simultaneously craves a meticulously organised Notion system and wants to launch forty-three projects at once — and who has masked so effectively, for so long, that she’s lost track of what she actually wants underneath all that adaptation. What we’ll talk about here isn’t growth for its own sake. It’s about finding work that fits, clients you actually want, and building income around a life you’re designing — not somebody else’s template for what that should look like. Welcome. You exist. Karina If you’ve read this far, you’re probably my person. Subscribe — I write letters because I believe some things deserve to be sat with.
read →